Friday, January 25, 2013

Follow Friday - Quatrevingt-Treize Is a Victor Hugo Novel About the French Revolution


It's Friday again, and this means it's time for Follow Friday. There has been a slight change to the format, as now there are two Follow Friday hosts blogs and two Follow Friday Features Bloggers each week. To join the fun and make now book blogger friends, just follow these simple rules:
  1. Follow both of the Follow My Book Blog Friday Hosts (Parajunkee and Alison Can Read) and any one else you want to follow on the list.
  2. Follow the two Featured Bloggers of the week - Books Are the Only True Magic and Sugar & Snark.
  3. Put your Blog name and URL in the Linky thing.
  4. Grab the button up there and place it in a post, this post is for people to find a place to say hi in your comments.
  5. Follow, follow, follow as many as you can, as many as you want, or just follow a few. The whole point is to make new friends and find new blogs. Also, don't just follow, comment and say hi. Another blogger might not know you are a new follower if you don't say "Hi".
  6. If someone comments and says they are following you, be a dear and follow back. Spread the love . . . and the followers.
  7. If you want to show the link list, just follow the link below the entries and copy and paste it within your post!
  8. If you're new to the Follow Friday Hop, comment and let me know, so I can stop by and check out your blog!
And now for the Follow Friday Question: What is the last book that kept you up late into the night just to finish it?

Ever since I first stayed up all night to read The Hobbit during the summer between my fourth and fifth grade years, I have always been someone who would get engrossed in a book, shut out the entire world, and keep reading until the wee hours of the morning. I cannot count the number of times that I have looked up at the end of a book and saw the clock reading two, three, four, five, or even later in the morning. Or the number of times that I have said to myself, "Just one more chapter and I'll put the book down and go to sleep", and when that chapter ended, said, "Just one more", and then when that chapter ended, "Just one more", and so on, until I found myself turning the last page. So this is a not uncommon phenomenon for me. Not only that, there are often times when I start reading a series, and I keep plowing through until I'm done with all of its books. And the last time I was up all night reading a book, it was actually a series of books:

David Brin's Second Uplift Trilogy

The Uplift universe, which the books are set in, is a fascinating science fiction universe to begin with. To sum up the setting, once humanity moves into interstellar space, it discovers that there is a vast, several billion year old intergalactic civilization in which all of the races have been "uplifted" by a patron race, and in many cases have turned around and "uplifted" successor races. Humanity's belief that they have evolved sapience without aid from another race is viewed with a mixture of derision and hostility, and only the fact that humanity had already begun uplifting chimpanzees and dolphins saved us from extermination.

The "Uplift Storm" trilogy follows directly after the events of the last book of the first Uplift trilogy, and follows the human and dolphin crewed ship Streaker as they try to make their way home with their controversial archaeological cargo, desperately trying to avoid the numerous hostile races attempting to claim their discovery as their own. On the way, they run across a planet that had been illegally settled by six races, including humans, some of whose inhabitants get sucked into the adventure. The story takes on a wildly huge epic scope as the crew of the Streaker come into contact with the other orders of life in the Universe - hydrogen breathers, machine life, transcendent life, and so on, and also have to deal with a literally galaxy shattering event. And along the way, the pitfalls of depending upon received technology (as most of the races in galactic civilization other than humans do) are revealed. The story kept pulling me forward, flipping the pages to see what happened next. I think I finished all three books in under thirty-six hours. Maybe. The last couple of hours were kind of bleary.

Go to subsequent Follow Friday: The Atomic Number of Plutonium Is Ninety-Four

Follow Friday     Home

8 comments:

  1. I have not read this series. Actually, this is the first I'm hearing about them. Glad you liked them.

    new follower. My FF:
    http://booksojourner.blogspot.com/2013/01/feature-follow-late-night-reading.html

    ReplyDelete
  2. I have not read the series but I am another "just another chapter" kinda reader LOL

    My Feature & Follow post.

    Angelica @ Paperback Princess

    ReplyDelete
  3. @Jenny: It is a good series, but if you do decide to try it, I recommend reading the first Uplift trilogy first (Sundiver, Startide Rising, and The Uplift War).

    ReplyDelete
  4. @Angelica: I am always saying to myself "just another chapter". I think it is a sickness. On the other hand, I don't want to be cured.

    ReplyDelete
  5. @Julia Rachel Barrett: When I get into a story I often can't put it down.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Oooh... I really need to read these books, they sound amazing! Thanks!

    Anyway, new follower here. :)

    My FF: http://escapingrealitybookreviews.wordpress.com/2013/01/28/feature-and-follow/

    ReplyDelete
  7. @Lynette: They are really good. Two of the books in the first Uplift trilogy (Startide Rising and The Uplift War) won the Hugo Award for Best Novel.

    ReplyDelete